children s birthday parties; of Seth and
Amy flying balsa-wood airplanes in the
back yard; of Seth on his way to the
prom, grinning, in his red Camaro.
Then the images of Seth ceased and, as
Judy turned the pages, we saw a pressed
flower; a poem, in Greek, by Sam s
mother; and the faded program from
Seth s memorial service.
"What the Bishops have gone
through really is a Greek tragedy," their
friend Eileen Sharkey had told me.
"One child destroys another by acci-
dent, then is destroyed herself, and the
parents are left to watch as every little
thing that could be salvaged from Seth s
death---Amy s attempt to have a normal
life---is torn away."
Judy had prepared a lunch of tuna
sandwiches, and as we ate at the kitchen
table Sam said that, during the weeks
after the Alabama shooting, TV crews
had set up klieg lights outside their
home and shone them through the win-
dows, so that at midnight it felt like the
middle of the day. They did not dispute
the horror of what Amy had done in Al-
abama, though they didn t dwell on it,
either. "She s a brilliant, brilliant girl,
and she just snapped," Judy said. But the
Bishops expressed a righteous fury over
what they perceive to be the opportunis-
tic score-settling of authorities in Mas-
sachusetts. "They were out to find some
way to nail Polio," Judy said. She is
offended by the notion that these men
would presume to tell her how her
own son died. "I was there!" she ex-
claimed. "I saw it happen. It changed
my life."
The Bishops told me that Frazier
had lied in his February press confer-
ence. At that event, Frazier had not only
suggested a conspiracy between Judy
Bishop and Chief Polio; he had errone-
ously claimed that the morning argu-
ment had been between Amy and Seth.
Judy scoffed at Frazier s implication that
she was politically powerful in Brain-
tree: she had been a member of the
Town Meeting, but that body consisted
of some two hundred and forty people.
The Bishops believe that Solimini also
lied at the inquest when he conjured
Judy asking to see Polio and invoking
his first name. "We are damaged peo-
ple---we ll never be the same," Judy said,
her voice rising. "What they did is un-
forgivable. And I hope they burn in
Hell."
"O.K., Judy," Sam said, gently. He
had been nervously thumbing through
a folder of documents, and he began to
pull out copies of the original police re-
ports, each underlined and annotated.
He had discovered a U.S. Army report
suggesting that a military version of
the Mossberg twelve-gauge, when
dropped on its muzzle, can occasionally
misfire. But when he presented the
report at the inquest, Sam said, it was
ignored. (In fact, the officer who exam-
ined the gun after Seth s death men-
tioned the report when he testified---but
he added that he had personally "shock
tested" the weapon, and it had not
misfired.)
Sam explained that the kitchen in
the house on Hollis Avenue was a very
tight space. He stood up from the table
and mimed sweeping the shotgun
around, as Amy would have done to
show it to Seth. "I have a feeling she
may have banged it," he said, speculat-
ing that if the stock had hit a cabinet or
a counter, that might account for the
misfire.
When I asked about the family
"spat," Sam said that he had woken at
around ten that morning, but did not
come downstairs until around eleven-
thirty. "I almost tripped on something
in the hallway," he said. He doesn t re-
member what it was, but he repri-
manded Seth and Amy and told them
to pick up their belongings. "And they
responded, Amy especially," he said.
But they resolved the matter amicably.
"I didn t think anything of it," Sam
insisted.
On the subject of Amy s moods, Judy
said, "She had her father s temper."
"Did Amy and Sam ever butt heads?"
I inquired.
"Oh, yeah," Judy said, eying her hus-
band and chuckling. Sam said nothing.
In the Bishops view, the Dinger
Ford incident has been overblown.
"She was in shock!" Sam said, though
he could not explain why Amy had
racked the slide again after leaving the
house. In any case, Judy pointed out, if
Amy was looking for a getaway car,
she didn t need to go waving a shotgun
around. Judy s car was in the drive-
way. The keys were hanging by the
kitchen door.
One thing that particularly angers
the Bishops is the fact that Frazier and
other members of the department---
who supposedly were so troubled by the
decision to release Amy in 1986---said
nothing about the matter until the news
arrived from Alabama in 2010. The
Bishops have a point: dozens of cold
cases were reopened in Massachusetts
during those years. Fear of John Polio
might account for a reluctance to speak
out while he was still in power, but he
retired in 1987. "There was nothing said
for twenty-five years," Sam said. "Now,
"Now, remember, be the yourself we talked about."